From Reality to Robots to Superheroes
by hnh
Summary: Kitty Pryde is just another young, bored computer programmer working in an office that belongs in “Dilbert” when she takes up Bolivar Trask on his offer to help program one of his new top secret weapons. Maybe Lancitty, but I’m not making any promi
1. Prologue

From Reality to Robots to Superheroes  
  
Prologue  
  
Summary: AU. Kitty Pryde is just another young, bored computer programmer working in an office that belongs in "Dilbert" when she takes up Bolivar Trask on his offer to program one of his new top secret weapons. Maybe Lancitty, but I'm not making any promises.  
  
Disclaimer: Yeah, well, if I owned the X-Men, I probably would've sold them by now and be laughing all the way to the bank.  
  
......................................  
  
Kitty Pryde sat down in her miniscule cubicle and went to check her email. One would think that after graduating with honors from University of Chicago two years ago, she would've progressed beyond a lowly computer programmer in a department roughly the size of China, but this wasn't the best of job markets, and the millions of résumés she had sent to the inboxes of managers and headhunters alike appeared to have all landed in the trash can.  
  
Which is why she was surprised to find on this day a message waiting for her from Human Defense Systems. She'd emailed them several months ago and they had finally decided to reply. She double clicked on the message and a new screen popped up.  
  
It was a job offer. A rather lucrative job offer, no less, doing programming for the "special projects" department of HDS. She read the contract, and then quickly closed the window so her supervisor wouldn't see what she was doing and returned to her job.  
  
As she looked over the office software she was working on, he mind wandered back to the email. It didn't specify what kind of work she would be doing, but she knew that HDS was a government contracted company in charge of the security systems for the Pentagon, among other things. The founder, Bolivar Trask, had started initially in S.H.I.E.L.D. developing information and surveillance technology, but recently struck out on his own. Whatever she was going to do, it must have been important, because she would have a raise and company reimbursement for her metro ride from Hell's Kitchen into the New York suburbs.  
  
Whatever it was, it had to be more interesting than fixing bugs in office software.  
  
.......................................  
  
Just a short chapter, I know. This is more of a prologue than anything else.  
  
I'd also like to put out at this time a request for help from someone who knows a lot about computers, computer programming, etc, as this will deal with a number of those subjects. It's not exactly a heavy workload, since I'm a really slow writer, but if you enjoy explaining how computer security systems work, or programming for idiots, this idiot would appreciate help. And as an extra bonus, you get to learn what happens before everyone else does. Anyone interested is welcome to drop me a line at MusicNerd1685@netscape.net.  
  
Until next time,  
  
hnh 


	2. The First Week is Always the Worst

The First Week is Always the Worst  
  
Disclaimer: Blah blah blah, truth truth truth, so help you God.  
  
..........................................  
  
Kitty sat back in her chair and stared out into the lane between rows of cubicles as her computer booted up. She'd been at HDS for a week, but she still hadn't met many people in her department, so staring into the hallway was about all she could do with her free time. The few people she'd met during her brief training and orientation session had since disappeared to other parts of the gigantic converted military base that housed the entire company, and apparently the Office of Special Projects people weren't the most social computer geeks.  
  
It kind of sucked, actually, but she had only been there a few days, so she had hopes. Maybe today she would actually hold a conversation with some coworkers rather than merely asking them where the bathrooms were.  
  
The soft beep on of her computer told her it was done booting up. She took a look at her assignment for the day; she was supposed to fix some identified bugs in the program they'd given her.  
  
But first, she had to understand what the program was doing. She began to explore the software; it was a facial recognition system, something she was at least decently familiar with to begin with because she had studied them for her honors thesis in college. She'd tried to create a program that would be effective without invading too much into people's privacy.  
  
This program was structured much like the ones she had studied. It could pick a specific face out of a crowd and identify it's nodal points, points that, when taken in combination, create an individual's "face print." It would then take this specific pattern and translate it into a numerical code, which it ran through an unspecified database; if it didn't get a match, it stored the code in another database, if it did get a match, the targeted face was to be destroyed.  
  
"Wait a minute," she thought. That's not exactly typical of facial recognition software. Kitty wasn't even sure that was legal.  
  
"Well, hey there. It looks like I've got a new neighbor." A startled Kitty stared at the source of the interruption; a man was leaning on the wall between her cubicle and the next one over. "You must've come while I was on vacation last week," he said.  
  
"Um...yeah, I've," was all Kitty could fit in before he started talking again.  
  
"Hey, I know it's early, but do you fancy a bit of a coffee break? I'd like to get to know my new neighbor a bit before I start my day."  
  
Kitty looked at her computer screen, not wanting to take a break without at least having started her work. Then again, she told herself, she could always ask this guy what was going on with the weird programs.  
  
"Sure," she said.  
  
He looked positively delighted as he led her to the break room, Kitty assumed that, computer geek as he was, this was probably the first time a girl had immediately accepted an offer of his. She wasn't being mean, mind you, it's just that it was her experience that most programmers didn't get out much, and having a pretty, young woman in the office got them excited.  
  
He started brewing the coffee and then turned back to her.  
  
"I'm Steve, by the way," he said.  
  
"Kitty."  
  
"Aww, how cute, like a kitty cat." She just sighed; she was used to comments like that now. "Well," he continued, "I hope you've had a good first week at HDS. We pride ourselves on being warm and welcoming to new employees..."  
  
"Hmm..." she thought, "they obviously need to work on that one. I haven't actually held a conversation with a coworker yet, and this hardly counts as he's doing all the talking."  
  
"...I've worked here ever since we started working on this puppy, which would be what? Ten, fifteen years ago? I was working for the government then, but I followed the project out when it we went private."  
  
"Cool," she said. "What--"  
  
"Oh yeah, it's been great. I even got to see a prototype last year..."  
  
Kitty got the impression he could talk about this all day. She decided it would be best to just sit back and listen to him ramble, though. At least she was meeting someone, and maybe she would learn something about her project.  
  
"...I didn't do any of the robotics stuff, but the facial recognition technology was all mine. You know, so many--"  
  
"Wait, you did the facial recognition work?" Finally he was talking about something she cared about.  
  
"Oh yeah, that's mine," he said, in a rather important tone. "Why? Are you working on it now? I was so pissed when Trask sent it back to our department. I thought it was just fine, but they said it was letting people slip through because it required too many nodal points, but..."  
  
"I haven't gotten a good look at it, but--" He just kept talking. She couldn't get a word in edgewise.  
  
"...You know, I warned them there would be problems with this project if we just used the facial rec. Mitch Bogart, the supervisor at the time, tried to tell them that, but all he got was fired. The new one keeps his mouth shut, but I still say that we're never going to get them until--" "Wait a minute, wait a minute," she interrupted. Who was this "them" of which he spoke? What exactly WAS this project anyway? "Who're you trying to catch?" she asked.  
  
That actually stopped his talking. He just stared at her blankly.  
  
"You mean you don't know?"  
  
She just shook her head. Was she supposed to have known?  
  
"Oh honey," he said patronizingly, "they're looking for mutants."  
  
And that's when it happened. She lost control and her hands slipped right through her coffee cup. It shattered on the floor, spilling coffee everywhere. Kitty looked up; the entire room was staring at her.  
  
"Oh, I uh...just lost my grip," she said. She grabbed some paper towels and mopped up the coffee while most of the people in the break room went back to their normal work.  
  
Except for Steve. Her talkative cubicle neighbor just stared, open- mouthed, his gaze moving between her hands and the broken mug on the floor. She knew he had seen what had happened.  
  
"Well," she said as she gathered up the remains of her mug, "I should get back to work. Nice to, uh...talk to you, Steve." She headed back to her cubicle and sat down, trying to gain control of her racing heart. She hadn't made a mistake like that in a while, and she hadn't phased through anything in public since college.  
  
She'd almost forgotten she was a mutant. Lord knows she'd tried. When she'd first learned she could move through solid objects, her parents had totally freaked; they wouldn't let her leave the house for a week, and when they finally let her out, they refused to mention it. It was like it'd never happened.  
  
For them, at least. Try as she might, Kitty couldn't avoid unintentionally phasing through stuff. She just couldn't prevent herself; every time she had a nightmare, she ended up in her basement, and once, when another girl tried to push her into her gym locker in a fight, she'd gone right through the wall and ended up in some locker in the boy's locker room. Though she knew more or less what was going on, she still didn't know what she was. She'd only heard of mutants from whispered rumors and crazy tabloid articles.  
  
It wasn't until college that anyone was able to explain to her why she could get into her room even if she lost her key. She'd gone to pick up a paper from her literature professor and was so shocked at getting a B- (she'd never gotten a B- on a paper, ever) that she sank into the floor right in front of her professor. Professor Winters stared at her, standing ankle-deep in the carpet, and then, inexplicably, she laughed.  
  
"Oh, dear," she managed between giggles, "I guess I'm not as alone here as I thought I was."  
  
She shut the door and pulled Kitty out from the carpet, all without getting up from her chair, as she explained to the frightened freshman that she was mildly telekinetic, and for the first time in her life, Kitty began to understand what she was. Throughout college, Julia Winters did her best to help Kitty get used to her powers. She mostly taught her control exercises, but she also tried to introduce the girl into a wider community of mutants at University of Chicago.  
  
It was great to finally know why she sometimes dropped her books or fell through her floor; it was even better to be able to consciously stop it from happening. But sometimes, Kitty was still embarrassed by her behavior. Big shocks still made her lose control, and this most recent bit of news was most certainly a big shock.  
  
The software she was fixing was designed to destroy her. No doubt Bolivar Trask had a gigantic database of identified mutants somewhere, and was planning to do God knows what with it. It scared her to no end to think of what might happen if this program were put to use.  
  
But then again, she told herself, so many new technologies never make it out of the prototype stage, and even if this did, it's not like she was an identified mutant. She didn't even want her powers, much less want to use them to terrorize all humanity like the mutants she'd heard about. Why would Trask ever come after her?  
  
"It's going to be OK, Kitty," she told herself, "just stay calm, and nobody will notice."  
  
Hopefully.  
  
.......................................  
  
Voila! A real chapter. Many thanks to those who reviewed.  
  
Till next time,  
  
hnh 


	3. It'd be So Much Easier if You Could Just...

It'd Be So Much Easier If You Could Just Tell  
  
Disclaimer: Just because nobody wants to admit it doesn't mean we don't all know it.  
  
.......................................  
  
Bolivar Trask leaned back in his chair and stared at his computer screen. A security warning from one of his longtime programmers glowed back at him.  
  
"I saw her mug fall right through her hands. She didn't drop it, I would've seen her hands move if she had, and it just slipped right through her body."  
  
He knew there was a reason he had moles all over the company. Even when you do a thorough background check on every person hired, someone always falls through the cracks. He had the file for the suspected mutant, Katherine Pryde, sitting right in front of him, and even though her behavior sounded distinctly suspicious, nothing in her background check had been out of the ordinary. It was time to do some research.  
  
He opened up his web browser and typed "katherine pryde mutant" but all he got was,  
  
"Your search-katherine pryde mutant-did not match any documents."  
  
He tried different spellings and nicknames, he searched in conjunction with the University of Chicago, her hometown of Northbrook, even her high school. He found out that she was captain of the engineering team her senior year, but if she was a mutant, he certainly wasn't going to find out about it through Google.  
  
It was time to change tactics. He left his office and started toward the Office of Special Projects.  
  
The OSP division had always been his favorite office. Sure, he got the most money for his regular security systems, but even when he'd been working on huge complex projects for the Pentagon, nothing compared to the excitement of entirely new technology. In the years he'd been working on this project, he'd never once been bored with it. Not only were they practically forging a new way of approaching robotics and artificial intelligence, but he was doing a valuable social service as well. HDS would be known throughout the world for they work they'd done; even the government would come around some day.  
  
To find out now that a mutant in his office could be threatening the integrity of everything he'd been working for in the last fifteen years was a serious problem indeed, one he would quickly remedy if it turned out to be true.  
  
He reached the central room and found the mutant's cubicle. After only a few minutes of searching, he found what he was looking for: a single hair. It was brown and much longer than the average man's; it had to belong to her. He put it in a plastic bag and immediately went back to his office. He'd send it to the lab tomorrow, and if she did actually possess the X- gene, he'd know what to do.  
  
.......................................  
  
"Kitty, you've been unnaturally subdued for, like, a week. Are you sure you like that new job?"  
  
Kitty rolled her eyes and turned to her roommate. "Erin, it's fine. It's just...full of computer nerds."  
  
"Fully of computer nerds, you say? That could be your problem." Erin plopped down on the couch and turned the TV on.  
  
Kitty laughed. "At least I don't spend my day shuffling papers for egotistical lawyers, unlike some people I know."  
  
"True, but I'm not the only woman in my department, stuck in front of a computer all day programming...what is it you program again?"  
  
"Oh, just fixing bugs...and...stuff..." she trailed off. She'd been doing that a lot lately. Erin suspected there was something weird going on at work, but she didn't want to pry. Kitty had dealt with a lot of crap at her old job, so she suspected she could handle whatever was going on now.  
  
"Oh, stuff. How...interesting." Erin decided it was time for a subject change. "Come on, let's get started on this movie or else we'll be watching it until three AM."  
  
"You really want to watch all of Pride and Prejudice tonight?" Kitty asked.  
  
"Um, obviously. You've been so down lately. You really need a good drooling session over Colin Firth."  
  
It wasn't exactly hard to sell her on that point. "Ok," she said. "Let me go get the DVD."  
  
Erin started flipping channels while Kitty went into their room. She got all the way through basic cable with the realization that there was nothing on TV, and Kitty had still not returned from the room. Maybe she couldn't find the DVD.  
  
She got up and started toward the room. "I think I left it right by my b—"  
  
She stopped in horror. Their usually spotless room looked like a war zone, and Kitty was nowhere to be found. An open window let in a cold wind from the street, but all she could see from it was the busy New York traffic.  
  
.......................................  
  
Again, just a short one. I'm writing more, I promise-school's over for me, (and I've finally escaped 5 hours of rehearsal a day) so I actually have time to think about things outside of the theatre building.  
  
Many thanks to those who reviewed (and I'm working on "Shades of Darkness" too-I swear)  
  
hnh 


End file.
